If there was any doubt that software-defined networking (SDN) expertise is a hot ticket, Oracle’s planned acquisition of Xsigo, coming on the heels of VMware’s blockbuster $1.26 billion buy of Nicira, should erase it once and for all. Read more »
A misconfigured network device caused Windows Azure to crash and burn in Europe yesterday. In a blog post, Microsoft said it is still digging into the root cause of the outage and will report back next week. Read more »
Now that VMware has bought Nicira, doubts about the future of the VCE effort have multiplied. Word is that with Nicira in the fold, VMware and EMC get much more competitive with Cisco, stressing the VCE partnership all three companies founded three years ago. Read more »
The Boston area’s push to remake itself as a bike-friendly venue, is starting to pay off, at least in Cambridge’s tech-heavy Kendall Square neighborhood. And now things may get even greener as the Hubway bike-sharing is set to expand beyond Boston into Cambridge as well as Somerville and Brookline. Read more »
Amazon didn’t wow the street with its Q2 earnings news but the company will definitely keep investing in its cloud infrastructure. For its upcoming quarter, it plans to spend a strapping $800 million to $900 million capex money on technology, said CFO Tom Szkutak. Read more »
Google Chat and Windows Azure outages are one thing. The latest Twitter meltdown, on the other hand, had Twitter addicts dealing with withdrawal. The site is back up, but still no word from Twitter on why the outage happened. Stay tuned. Read more »
The popular Google Talk app is down for most users on Thursday morning. This snafu, which cut many people off from their instant messaging/video chat app of choice, along with today’s WIndows Azure snafu in Europe, show the dark side of cloud computing. Read more »
For anyone needing a reminder that no computing cloud is perfect — Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud went down in Europe on Thursday. Few details are available, but Microsoft says it’s on the case. Read more »
For companies wanting to put workloads on a public cloud without having to sweat the details, Appfog has a bold proposition. It says its new PaaS will abstract out all that annoying tweaking and tuning for loads running on Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or HP clouds. Read more »
Ginger.io, an up-and-coming Boston area health IT startup, is opening an office in San Francisco. The company, which grew out of MIT, will retain its Cambridge, Mass. headquarters but morph into a bi-coastal effort, according to CEO Anmal Madan. Read more »
Meteor Development, the hot startup that aims to remake enterprise software development, picked up some pretty impressive coin in a $11.2 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with contributions from Matrix Partners. Rod Johnson will join Meteor’s board. Read more »
Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $5 per month, has snagged $5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K. It will use the money to beef up sales and marketing efforts. Read more »
For years, tech vendors built complicated partner programs to sell, support and maintain their stuff and break into new markets. Now Google, Amazon are following suit with new-look partner programs. The goal is to bring new customer business into their respective clouds. Read more »
People who don’t like the idea of Google photographing their homes — and sniffing their wifi– will really hate this: The National Security Agency is compiling huge dockets of information on citizens including email and cell phone conversations, according to former NSA officials. Read more »
While it’s overstating the case to say that Box has renounced its fatwa on Windows Phones, it is worth pointing out that the cloud storage company now supports the current release of Windows Phone and will support the upcoming Windows 8 Phone as well. Read more »
Keen.io the startup that wants to supply the analytics platform for the mobile masses, netted $750,000 in new funding atop the $118,000 it already took in via TechStars. The investors include 500 Startups, Data Collective and SK Ventures, said co-founder Kyle Wild. Read more »
A cadre of OpenStack developers is leaving Rackspace, taking their talents to Nebula, another OpenStack backer. Most of those leaving came to RackSpace via its acquisition of Anso Labs, in February, 2011. Read more »
Techies know how important information technology is to a company’s success. Now new research by Gartner and Forbes seems to indicate that corporate boards have gotten that message as well, with board members ranking IT improvement as highly as boosting sales. Read more »
Big data, properly applied, can help save energy, cure diseases, better predict trends. But there’s also worry that abuse of big data will benefit big government and corporations to the detriment of citizens, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. Read more »
For all of Microsoft’s huge investment in the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, there was very little mention of the multi-billion-effort on Thursday’s Q4 and FY 2012 earnings call. Microsoft CFO touted major updates for Windows, Windows Phone, Office and Windows Server in the coming year. Read more »
Here’s a headline: For its fourth quarter ending June 30, Microsoft reported a loss of $492 million, compared to profit of $5.87 billion for the year ago quarter. The loss includes a previously announced $6.19 billion write down on its struggling online services division. Read more »
What one thing would you tell your younger self if you had the opportunity? Hacker News posed the question — borrowed from the Twitter@ayoungerme account — to its community and got some interesting results — some flip and some philosophical. Read more »
Mark Penn, the spin king/pollster who worked with Bill Clinton during Monica-Gate and advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, is now taking on Microsoft where he will head up “special projects” and focus on the consumer sector, reporting to CEO Steve Ballmer. Read more »
Amazon’s new “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large” compute instances use SSD to store and retrieve lots of data fast — which should make them popular for interactive web and mobile applications where real-time response to user clicks and gestures is key. Read more »
Doug Burgum helped launch Great Plains Software and grow it into a company Microsoft bought for $1.1 billion. As chairman of SuccessFactors, he helped bring that company into SAP for $4.3 billion. Now he’s helping Atlassian grow as well. Read more »
The mystery of the spam afflicting Dropbox users remains unsolved as of late Wednesday. Starting Monday, users of the popular file-sync-and-store service started complaining about spam sent to email addresses associated only with their Dropbox accounts. Read more »
The need for a way to plan and deploy cloud computing most efficiently is growing. The latest proof: RightScale’s acquisition of ShopForCloud, a free service that assesses the costs for cloud deployments before they’re rolled out. It works across multiple clouds and currencies. Read more »
Akiban, the hot Boston-based NewSQL database startup, is making two offerings Akiban Server and Persistit available as downloads this week. To date beta testers have run Akiban Enterprise as an add-on to existing SQL databases. Akiban Server goes it alone. Read more »
A new ARM-based OpenStack cloud comes online this week, courtesy of HP, Calxeda and Canonical. The new “TryStack” facility gives developers who want to test out OpenStack clouds another flavor to try. The news comes out of the OSCON conference this week. Read more »
The new Pat Gelsinger-led VMware must do three things to succeed: Carefully guard against favoring its parent company’s products too much; tend to the crucial virtualization and management technologies that underlie its entire franchise; and be nicer to customers and partners. Read more »
A day after reports surfaced that Paul Maritz is out as CEO of VMware there is offical confirmation. Maritz will become chief strategist at parent company EMC reporting to EMC CEO Joe Tucci. As expected, Pat Gelsinger will take the top slot at VMware. Read more »
Racemi, which specializes in moving business workloads onto and between clouds, snagged $7 million in second-round funding led by Paladin Capital Group and Harbert Venture Partners. The money will fund the expansion of Racemi’s sales, service and engineering efforts. Read more »
Egnyte nets $16 million in Series C funding to position itself as a leading hybrid cloud storage provider. The cash brings its total funding to $32 million. Google Ventures led the round which included funding from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris. Read more »
As VMware CEO Paul Maritz launched a four-year acquisition spree that brought the virtualization kingpin into software development and end user applications where it competes with Microsoft and others, he also left the company’s core business unprotected, critics say. Read more »
As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off the company’s latest Office software Monday, he hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins. They had to. But a very different interface might spook current Office users. Read more »
Cisco Systems is buying Virtuata, a specialist in virtual machine security and will meld that company into its data center security group, led by David Yen. As virtualization of workloads proliferates across organizations and data centers, the need for VM security will only grow. Read more »
The thought that everyone should write software is gaining steam. The reasoning is that if all the people who use software actually understand how to build software, everyone’s better off. But if everyone codes, what’s that mean for the professionals? Read more »
The OpenStack cloud computing project turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process. The opportunity is huge, but the challenges are too. Read more »
Apple took Microsoft to school with its iPod, iPhone, iPad trilogy and Microsoft responded with vows to one-up Apple with Surface and Windows phones. But can the Microsoft of the 21st century do what the older Microsoft did in overcoming foes? Skepticism abounds. Read more »
Two big Amazon outages over the past month certainly got everyone’s attention. Here are three tactical measures cloud users should take to minimize damage from future cloud computing snafus. Broadly, the outages also ratchet up pressure for companies to move to multiple clouds. Read more »
